Private Life (28 page)

The lady with the beaver coat and the scratches on her face was Rosa Trènor. Quick to recover, she disappeared in the company of the gray man and a young woman. She had gone there to make a scene, and her work at the Grill Room was done for the evening. The man with the cut on his forehead, Frederic de Lloberola, had them apply a taffeta strip to the wound, which was insignificant. The girl with him was over her attack of hysteria. The waiters cleaned the carpet, set the table with fresh tablecloths, and brought over another bottle of wine, another filet mignon, and another cheese soup.

Rosa Trènor wanted to break up with Frederic, but in her own particular way, which in fact would be like not breaking up. Frederic had had no intention of splitting with her because, oblivious as he was, and seeing other women behind her back as he did, he still found some kind of company and solace in being able to express all the vacuous thoughts that passed through his head to Rosa Trènor in conversations and over dinner. From time to time, a night with her was not all that bad. Frederic thought Rosa was perfectly satisfied with this arrangement, and that the money she had recently asked him for and that he had not been able to give her was of no consequence. Frederic thought her asking for cash was just a casual thing. He thought perhaps she didn’t even need it, and even if she did, she could get along without it. He was convinced that Rosa was an altruist who put no price on her gratitude to Frederic for having renewed their friendship and chosen her as a confidante for such an important life as his.

For all these reasons, Frederic had begun to treat Rosa in a rather despotic way. Ever since the garbage collector had carted off the general’s dog, Frederic had stopped being generous. That gesture of sacrifice was enough to give Frederic a perfect notion of his control over Rosa and of her unconditional devotion to him. Once in possession of this idea he allowed himself to relax his solicitude and treacly gallantry.

Naturally, Rosa saw things very differently from how Frederic imagined them. Rosa thought he pined for her and she had him in her grasp. She thought he was being unfaithful out of spite and revenge. It was his proper desperation – because Rosa considered Frederic a gentleman and she believed in “proper” desperation – in the face of her refusal to bestow certain favors that Frederic demanded and she did not allow. These favors existed only in Rosa’s imagination. A month after they renewed their relations, Rosa and he pretended they could maintain an open-minded status quo. But since they were both romantics, Rosa forswore absolutely her early morning bouquets of camellias (so Frederic thought, at least). Before the sacrifice of the dog, they enjoyed two weeks of outright love. This put wind under Rosa’s wings, but Frederic’s refusal to give her money and his latest infidelities (that she, as we have said, considered unimportant and attributed to spite) obliged her to take some violent action, pull off some outrageous stunt. Frederic had not been to her house in a week, and Rosa was beginning to wonder. For the time being, Frederic was of very little use to her, but he could always turn out to be an ace in the hole, and even his economic situation could be susceptible to change. Don
Tomàs was a very old man. He could be carried off to heaven in a blink of the eye, and a bit of change would have to fall Frederic’s way.

Rosa thought that if she broke up with him in a boring way perhaps Frederic, less ardent than she thought, would use the opportunity to end the whole thing. But, if she staged a theatrical break-up, with a bloody and scandalous sort of grandeur, she would impress Frederic and awaken a little rumble in his heart. She believed much more strongly in a kick to the head than in a cold shoulder to keep the pathos of love alive.

When Rosa learned that Frederic was pursuing a young girl from the Excelsior, a French girl who had just arrived in Barcelona, she organized a little police detail and surprised them at the Grill Room. So as not to go alone she had picked up a notary from Manresa whom she had captivated at the Colón, and she had him buy her a half dozen oysters and a chicken leg.

The scene was incredibly tawdry. Verbal abuse on the man’s part; hairpulling on the woman’s. The little French girl proved to have the claws of a cat and after the obligatory scratches she went into a hysterical fit. Frederic said a few harsh words to Rosa, and she decided to scrape his forehead a little with the neck of the previously broken wine bottle, taking great care not to hurt him too badly.

Frederic had found the scene very unpleasant, and the cut on his forehead was throbbing. Even so, once Rosa was gone, he was actually rather pleased. This was great publicity for a man of his age; it gave him a sort of gigolo’s cachet, and infused him with dignity in the eyes of the staff of the restaurant. “Rosa is in love with me,” he
thought. “The proof is in the pudding; if she weren’t hurt by my behavior, if she weren’t utterly smitten, she wouldn’t have risked such a scene. One thing is clear: this is the only way to deal with women.” Thinking these optimistic thoughts, he sank his teeth into the filet mignon, which ceded to the pressure of his mandible, and swallowed the first slice of meat with cruelty. With another bit of cruelty, he lightly twisted the short hairs at the nape of the little French girl’s neck, which triggered a voluptuous shriek from the girl and sent the first spoonful of cheese soup spurting from her pouty lips.

“This must have something to do with menopause,” thought Frederic. “The last gasp of passion, the swan song. But I’ve had enough. It’s not worth my while to be embarrassed or put out by an old bag like her.” This was the chivalrous way in which the good gentleman of Lloberola referred to love. In the end, he wasn’t entirely wrong and, in point of fact, he had had enough of Rosa Trènor. Their novel had come to an end.

People from the Excelsior were beginning to pour into the Grill Room. The florist at the door was selling bouquets of roses and work was piling up in the kitchen.

Two young men had just sat down at a table near the door, across from the bar. The waiter set down two whiskeys without so much as a word. He looked at them in a bitter, condescending way, as waiters do with unimportant clients who often neglect to bring enough money to pay the check.

One of the young men was a bit worked up and, though he was usually not excitable, that night the words tumbled out quickly and
chaotically. His buddy followed him with bored, drooping eyelids. The excitable one said:

“I want to write a novel about a situation I’ve seen from close up and in detail. A really big deal …”

“Look, in Barcelona there are thousands of tall tales. I don’t know what case you’re referring to, but it would be enough for me just to tell my mother’s story. The plot is the least of it. The real thing is to know how to write it. How to put things down, how to make them interesting and alive. I’ve tried it many times, but I’ve given up. I’ve found a simpler way to earn a living …”

“I’m not ready to give up yet. If I ever publish something, I know they’ll say I’m resentful and deceitful, when in truth it’s reality that’s resentful and deceitful.” When a novel states a fact that ties into another fact and another and another, as the chain goes on, the events begin to seem more and more extraordinary, and the characters take on a chiaroscuro effect without grays, and the melodrama builds, most people reading the novel will think it’s a bunch of lies, and that such things are impossible in real life. And the truth is exactly the opposite: if you just wrote down the characters and the ‘permutations’ you can find in a city like ours – right here in Barcelona – and even within our own circle, you would be called an idiot. Believe me, there’s no need to wait for a dark, sensational crime, the kind that scares concierges stiff when they read about them in the newspapers. These splashy, absurd crimes and criminals are not at all important, you see. But, if you could look inside the high society gentlemen
and ladies who appear to lead perfectly gray and proper lives, whom no one would ever suspect of a thing, who appear incapable of a violent gesture or of any slightly spectacular and interesting act … If you could follow in their hideous footsteps, you would have more plots than you could ever know what to do with. And I’m talking about plots of the sort you couldn’t spit out in public without running the risk of being drawn and quartered and banished from society like an undesirable villain.”

“Yes, of course, no doubt about it. I couldn’t agree with you more. But if I could write the way I would like to write, I wouldn’t be deterred by anything they might say about me. I would forge ahead. The problem is that here in this country there is no one, at least no one so far, who conveys this direct and passionate connection to the lives of the people around us, with all their pettiness and also with whatever modicum of grandeur they might have. You say you have an interesting story to tell. So tell it. Prove it. I know I’m not the one to do it. I don’t have it in me. I gave up long ago …”

“I want to find the way to say these things. Sometimes I think I’m somebody, and I feel I have the stuff to write a great novel. But then I remember how lazy and incompetent I am. I read a couple of lines I’ve written, and I find them trite. The style is clumsy, and couldn’t even run on wheels. You’ve read a few of my poems – you know I’ve never dared publish a single one. My family would be scandalized. And even though I have nothing but contempt for my family, I do have a bit of respect for my mother and I can imagine her dismay. The
worst thing would be for me to go on with this project I have now, this story I am so attached to that there are moments when I even frighten myself. I feel like some kind of monster. I don’t know where this all came from. I mean, I’m not responsible for this. My grandfather or great-grandfather must have been quite out of the ordinary. Because I know perfectly well who my father is, and he is nothing but a silly puppet. My mother must be a saint; I’ve never dared to judge her.”

“You’re just a lazy bum. And you’re full of baloney. It’s okay to live like a bohemian for a while and pretend to be a cynic, but you should be working at something, anything. You can’t spend your whole life pretending to be misunderstood and never producing so much as a handful of paragraphs. Just start something and stick with it for real. If it’s no good, you throw it into the fire and you let it go, like me. I don’t mean to make myself out to be a saint. I’ve been just as much of a deadbeat as you. And all those unpleasant and ignominious things have gone on in my house, too, and I’ve gone along with it, but one day you just say enough, that’s behind me now. Now I’m working. I’m earning a good living, and I intend to get married. And you’re no kid yourself. You’re not stupid, either. You’re healthy and good-looking. When you’re a kid, no one can point a finger at you if you behave like a kid, and you can accept favors that would make a man blush, but the time comes when all of that is just not right. You’re too old. I don’t know if I should pry, but, from what you’ve told me, it seems you can’t expect much from your family …”

“Much less than not much! And the saddest thing is that I’m in love now; yes, me, in love!”

“About time. But it’s not the first time you’ve thought you were in love. This must be like the time you were in love with Glòria, that girl who used to buy you dinner every night at the Cafè Lion d’Or …”

“No, I swear, it’s not like that at all! I am in love with the protagonist of my novel. A woman I’ve only seen four times, and spoken with twice. I never said anything special to her. I don’t believe she would ever take notice of me. She is a very unusual woman, cold, twisted, bizarre … Cerebral in a way I don’t believe anyone else in Barcelona is.”

“You see what a bunch of nonsense this is? Do you hear how pretentious you sound? What do you mean, in love? Rotten romantic dime-store literature, that’s all it is. You’re thirty-one or thirty-two years old and you’re still a kid, a rather sleazy kid, not to put too fine a point on it, but …”

“Maybe so. And maybe sleazier than you think. And I’m not ashamed to say so. I swear, there is a scandalous voluptuosity to my sleaziness – you can’t even begin to imagine it. The first time I did something that seemed beneath contempt, I got a knot in my stomach. Later, I started seeking out that knot like a drug, a stimulant. And finally I no longer feel any knots at all, and I don’t know what I’d have to do to feel one …”

“You’re a damn fool. With all these obsessions with your family, with its atavistic past and its gloomy future, you’re going to go so far around the bend that one day you’ll go mad for real and you’ll start wanting to suck children’s blood …”

“I know I’m a damn fool. But I swear, from time to time I land a sweet piece of work. It’s not that I deserve it, it happens by chance.
It’s all a question of having a little nerve and grabbing the opportunity. If people here just had a little more nerve, amazing things could happen! Though, if you think about it, there’s plenty of nerve to go around … Still, Barcelona could look like a tale from the
Scheherezade …
”

“I can’t imagine what else you want to see happen. Right now it all seems like a perfect mess. Just in the past eight years, we’ve seen more than our share of things, of every variety and color in the rainbow …”

“Not to mention what we haven’t seen yet. And then they say there are no novels to be written here.”

Just as the excitable young man was saying this, a newsboy who was hawking
La Vanguardia
and
El Día Gráfico
stuck his head in the door. The young man with the drooping eyelids bought
La Vanguardia
. On the front page, among the day’s obituaries, the excitable young man saw a name that made him jump up from the bench he was sitting on.

“How can this be? He’s dead?”

“Yes, one of dozens; he’s dead. He was no one to you. The fact that an extremely rich man, and a creep at that, has died, is no reason for you to get all worked up. I don’t imagine he’s left you any spare change …”

“Come on, hand it over, let me see. ‘Has died,’ it says, and nothing more. It doesn’t mention the last rites, the sacraments. The guy must have croaked in an accident, or who knows how. Let me see the local news. Does it say anything about him? Yes, it does! Look here! What? How can this be! This is horrible! Obviously it must be a suicide. They
don’t quite come out and say it, of course, out of respect for the position of the deceased. They must have paid them to hush it up. But there can be no doubt … that pig committed suicide! Suicide!”